


Urban Legend

by AstroGirl



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-09
Updated: 2014-08-09
Packaged: 2018-02-12 10:11:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2105817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroGirl/pseuds/AstroGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>August is not his story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Urban Legend

August likes cities. Not exclusively, of course. He also likes jungles and mountains and beaches (just as long as no one tries to make him go whale-watching). He likes anywhere that's distracting, places so inherently interesting that he can write about them in the first person and his readers will never notice that they don't know him any better at the end than they did in the beginning. 

But he likes cities differently. He likes the anonymity. Everybody in the city has a story, and none of them care very much about yours.

**

Well, all right. His is a little different.

You know how it is, when you hear your name spoken in a public place, across a room? No matter how much noise and distance there might be between you and it, it reaches right into your brain, as surely as if someone had shouted it into your ear.

He hears his name like that, sometimes. His original name, the one his father gave him. Usually in the mouths of little kids, or someone calling someone else a liar. 

That's the downside of cities. Pack enough people together, and you'll hear them talk about everything they've ever heard of, sooner or later. It's a little better in places where they don't speak English, but Disney is freaking _everywhere_.

**

He did watch the movie. Once. So much about it was completely, ludicrously wrong, but it made him cry like a baby, anyway. He really shouldn't have gone to a theater showing. He could easily have gone the rest of his life without getting those kinds of looks from parents, or anybody else.

**

He wishes he knew how it works, how it is that reality, here, is nothing but stories. That's probably why he started writing, if he's honest about it. A desire to grab narrative by the throat and make it explain itself. A yearning to write himself a better story, a happier ending, a more heroic protagonist. 

It never worked, of course. Nothing he's written has ever been more than words on a page. The lifeless puppets of his intellect.

**

When he's gone, he thinks, people won't remember him at all. All they'll remember is the damned cartoon. Funny, how he both loves and hates that thought.

**

When he wakes with a wooden leg, it's terrifying. _Sickening._ It's all his sins catching up with him, all his time running out. 

But it's almost a relief that it's finally happening. That it's undeniable, now, exactly who and what he is. That he no longer has to pretend to himself he doesn't know the truth: He walked out in the middle of his own story. He's let everything be made into a lie. He isn't real, and he hasn't been real for a very long time.

Maybe soon he'll be able to tell someone his name.


End file.
